DARIAH Day @ UZH

Workshop, 18. December 2017, University of Zurich

DARIAH Day is a one day workshop intended to introduce the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) to the linguistic community in Zurich. The workshop will focus on the #dariahTeach platform, which was created through the funding of an ERASMUS+ strategic partnership to test modules for open-source, high-quality, multilingual teaching materials for the digital arts and humanities.

Participants will:

- Discover European infrastructures for digital humanities

- Learn the basics of XML / TEI

- Find out how to use the Multimodal Literacies eTalk tool

- Meet representatives of two leading European networks

Participation is free of charge. While the topics may be of particular interest to students and researchers of linguistic fields, participants from other fields are welcome as well!

Partitive Determiners and Partitive Case

Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, Partitive Elements (PE), which are typologically marked, display a fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation across European languages, a variation that is far from being described, let alone understood. The main obstacle to this is the fact that, up to now, PEs have been analysed only in restricted linguistic environments, and in general only for one language/variety, without a pan-European perspective.

The goal is to work on this phenomenon in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, studying the emergence and spread of markers of partitivity, the theoretical analysis of these elements (articles pronouns, cases), and the strong affectedness of these elements by language contact (change or loss).

The first workshop of the PARTE Network will focus on Partitive Determiners and Partitive Case in European languages and dialects, their acquisition, their behavior under language contact, their emergence and spread in the diachrony, the best methods of data gathering and annotation, theoretical analyses of their syntax and interpretation in a cross-theoretic perspective.

Keynote speakers:

Anne Carlier (University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3)

Urtzie Etxeberria (CNRS, Baiona)

The PARTE Network is funded by NWO (the Netherlands Organization for scientific research) and co-funded by the Universities of Zurich, Venice, Budapest and Pavia.

Knowledge in Interaction

Workshop, 10 - 11 November 2017, Swiss Science Centre Technorama

In the context of their SNF funded project ‘Interactive Discoveries’, which analyses visitor interactions at the Swiss Science Centre Technorama, Wolfgang Kesselheim, Christina Brandenberger and Christoph Hottiger of the VideoLab are organizing an international workshop on knowledge and its construction in interaction. The workshop will take place at the Technorama in Winterthur on the 10th and 11th of November 2017 and will aim to shed new light on knowledge in interaction by approaching the topic from different perspectives. In order to do this, we invited experts from the fields of interactional linguistics (among them Elisabeth Gülich (Bielefeld), Arnulf Deppermann (Mannheim), and Stephan Habscheid (Siegen)), and science didactics (Markus Wilhelm, Lucerne), as well as members of the team who design the exhibition at the Technorama (Barbara Neff and Armin Duff). Topics to be discussed will include knowledge construction as an interactional phenomenon as such, and the way interactants make various sensory perceptions available to each other in this process, but also the specific ways the exhibition space and the exhibits in it influence visitors’ interactions and the way visitors appropriate this space in interaction. The workshop will conclude with a data session on how a specific element of the exhibition, namely the texts which accompany the exhibits, are used in visitors’ interactions and how they contribute to the process of interactive knowledge construction.

Contact: Wolfgang Kesselheim, wolfgang.kesselheim@ds.uzh.ch

Unlocking new data: Linguistic typology as a key to agreement variation

Workshop, 9. October 2017, University of Zurich, Room RAA-G-01

The study of agreement is of continuing interest in general linguistics and linguistic typology. Italian dialect varieties display a wealth of interesting phenomena in this area, some of which are unparalleled across Romance, or even within the whole Indo- European language family. However, this wealth of structural diversity has hardly been exploited in typological studies on agreement and thus could not find its way into the international scientific debate, mainly because of the unavailability of the primary data to the international scientific community. We want to fill this gap by developing an online database, consisting of annotated data from seven selected varieties (from north to south): Urbino, Ripatransone, Luras, Agnone, Altamura, Verbicaro, Pantelleria.

The one-day workshop will feature presentations of our international consultants intertwined with talks by project members, focusing on their research.

Everyone is welcome to attend. To facilitate planning please let us know by 29 September 2017 if you are coming by emailing Tania Paciaroni (paciaron@rom.uzh.ch).

61. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft

After more than 10 years, the StuTS, Student’s Conference for Linguistics(Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft) is returning to Switzerland. From the 25th to the 28th May 2017, students and PhD students of linguistics from Germany and the rest of Europe are meeting at the University of Zurich. The 61st StuTS conference includes keynote speeches from respected professors as well as a very promising panel discussion. The most important part of the conference are however the students’ presentations. Come, listen, and present your own research! Meet, connect, and exchange ideas with linguists from all over Germany and Europe!

Spatial Boundaries and Transitions in Language and Interaction: Perspectives from Linguistics and Geography

Conference, April 23-28, 2017, Monte Verità

The conference has three major objectives: to bridge the disciplinary boundaries between linguistics and geography, to provide new scientific insights into the roles of spatial boundaries, and to develop and exchange new methods for the measurement of boundaries in linguistics and interaction. As to the first objective, the conference brings together experienced and young researchers from hitherto rather separated sub-disciplines of linguistics and geography. As to the second goal, we want to launch a profound interdisciplinary debate on the issue of spatial boundaries by exploring why and how linguistic, natural and social boundaries change, how linguistic and spatial evolution proceeds, and how communicative spaces work. The third objective is achieved by a workshop at the end of the conference, which also deals with the current impact of big data on linguistic and geographic research.

Grammar and lexicon (in the sense of vocabulary) have both been central to understanding language change. However, their diachronic behavior is often contrasted in at least two respects:

It has been suggested that, on the whole, grammar (including morphology) changes more slowly than lexicon (e.g. Nichols 1992, 2003, Dunn et al. 2005). It has also been suggested that different types of grammatical structure have different degrees of diachronic stability, though this has so far not led to consensus (see Dediu & Cysouw 2013 for an overview of different approaches) In contact linguistics, it has repeatedly been claimed that structure is more resistant to borrowing than vocabulary (see e.g. Moravcsik 1978, Thomason & Kaufman 1988, McMahon & McMahon 2005), while at the same time structure is expected to leave substrate signals after language shift and in situations of convergence.

Morphology, with its close ties to both the lexicon and syntax, can play a key role in arriving at a better understanding of this seemingly contrastive diachronic behavior of lexicon and grammar. Morphology itself seems to display ambiguous diachronic behavior. On the one hand, the distribution of broad morphological types over the globe suggests areal, contact-related diffusion. On the other hand, patterns of flexivity and syncretism often show strong lineage-specific signals.

In order to better understand the dynamics of morphological patterns in time and space, we need (1) to develop more fine-grained approaches to morphological categories and types, in which broad types are broken down into lower-level variables, whose phylogenetic and areal behavior can then be studied individually; and (2) to adopt methods of analysis that are sensitive to genealogical and geographical diversity. Combining the latest insights in morphological theory and comparative-historical linguistics is crucial for adequately addressing one of the key challenges in comparative morphology: distinguishing contact-induced vs universally favored vs random spread of specific morphological patterns within families, or cross-family stability vs. areal spread.